How My Weeds Are Blooming Flowers

Working on a project with mom, she commented that it had been about 18 years since dad suffered from a brainstem stroke.

The air in my lungs left me when I heard that.

A lot of people don’t know that about our story. They don’t know the brokenness and anger and anxiety that walked through our home day and night. They don’t know how we worked through it. I’m really good at posting encouraging words and colorful pictures now and then, but I tend to avoid this topic. Maybe that’s because I’m still healing from it.

My entire childhood involved the rehabilitation of my father. Some of my earliest memories are watching my dad learn how to walk again up and down our hallway or hearing him say small words like, “cat,” over and over again with the speech therapist in his office. I watched as my mom, my hero, learned how to balance our home life, finances, relationships, and their marriage. It was never something to talk about with the faint of heart and I still may never share about the really dark parts of our stories that took place, but at least I can begin here.

I believe people need to see the broken parts of others to know that they are not the only ones broken.

It was through the pain I felt in the rocky relationship with my dad that I could learn to appreciate what real love looked like. Dad didn’t really know how to not be angry or verbally abusive in his recovery to us, and that’s okay, I’m sure I wouldn’t know how not to be either. He was living the life of his dreams at the time of his stroke and in a moment it was all stripped away from him. I will never understand the trauma he had to go through even to learn how to walk or speak again and so over the years I have learned to have grace. In learning grace for myself I could have grace for him, in learning God’s love for me, I could become love for him. I have learned to forgive the both of us for the ways we treated each other… but it did not happen overnight.

If I could have chosen a different life, with a more peaceful and quiet upbringing, what would I forfeit in learning? When I ask myself that question I embrace what I have gone through. I would never sell what I have learned through my past nor the peace I have learned to maintain through overcoming all the pain.

It was in these moments that I learned how to feel deeply and love intensely.

I learned how to relate with others and not judge people for where they’re at in their journey. We all have our own things to work through and sometimes our outer actions do not accurately portray what is really hiding within our soul.

Sometimes very sunshin-ey people have darkness

And sometimes very unhappy people have sunshine inside them.. They just need a little more help accessing it.

We never truly know what another human being is going through.

Many times, the things that got me through the hard days were appreciating the strangers that bought my cup of coffee, or the person that smiled at me in the aisles of the grocery store.

To let someone know that they are not alone is a super power.

To tell someone that you may not understand their situation, yet still choose to be that place of love for them can mean the world.

My husband, Mason, was that safe space for me. He brought a kind of love into our family that taught us all about the power of redemption. Through him I saw a kindness in my dad emerge and, through his example, I found that I could create redemption too.

You see, we can pray and plead and ask for redemption and love to enter into a situation, but if we do not become it ourselves these are all prayers in vain. We need to become the example of change we have been praying for.

I love my dad and I am sorry for all that has happened to him, but at the same time I am eternally grateful for who it has shaped me into as a human being. I would not be the same without it. I write all this mainly to air it out, but also to encourage those who may be growing through deep hurt. You will get through this and you will be stronger because of it. Don’t give up on love, forgiveness, or the things you have dreamed about most. You'll see, the weeds you've grown for so long will start blooming flowers. Sometimes we all need to go through the hard in order to become the people the world really needs. The world needs you.